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40 m.p.h. for Goods Vehicles Government Hint

1st December 1961
Page 35
Page 35, 1st December 1961 — 40 m.p.h. for Goods Vehicles Government Hint
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From Our Parliamentary Correspondent

ABID to ensure that speeding would not be included in the offences leading to automatic disqualification failed on Tuesday when the Lords considered amendments to the Road Traffic Bill. The House rejected the idea by SO votes to 11 after Ministers had described moves to raise speed limits.

Lord Hailsham said that last week the Departmental Committee on Road Safety had, in general, come down in favour of proposals relating to safety limits on vehicles other than buses and coaches. The principal one was that the maximum speed limit outside builtup areas for ordinary goods vehicles not drawing trailers should be raised from 30 to 40 miles per hour.

If this proposal went through, he said, it would make it much more difficult for the driver of a goods vehicle charged with exceeding his legal speed limit to claim he was committing a technical offence in which no element of danger was involved.

Lord Chesharn, .Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, said the Minister was asking all local authorities to review speed limits on classified roads and it was hoped this review would be completed as soon as possible, Moving the amendment, which would have taken speeding out of the list of disqualification offences, Lord Derwent said that, if it were accepted, speeding would still be an offence for which a licence was endorsed •and for which a court might disqualify. Speeding, he said, could be absolutely technical or extremely serious. He thought it wrong that, where it was a purely technical offence, a man might lose his licence and possibly his livelihood.

Lord Hawke pointed out that on many vehicles the speed limit had been kept unrealistically low because there had been a dispute between employers and employed for many years over the question of the alteration of schedules should the limit be lifted. On another category of vehicles the limit was imposed in order that the Treasury might safeguard the purchase tax revenue.

In both .cases the drivers were bound to exceed the limit almost the whole of their time on the.npen road in the natural course of their business.

"I cannot be a party to a law which, by .maintaining unrealistic speed limits on these vehicles for reasons other than road safety holds over the head of every commercial driver the threat of disqualification," he said.

The House was due to consider the Bill again yesterday.

Special Vehicles to Serve New Project

A N application by J. Fish and Sons, Ltd., Bristol, for eight special vehicles for the haulage of fertilizer, raw materials from Avonmouth Docks to the site of the new factory of LCI, now being developed on Severnside, was granted by the Western Licensing Authority, Mr. S. W. Nelson, on Monday after normal user had been amended from General Goods Great Britain to Goods for

10 miles.

The applicants also gave an undertaking to two objectors, R. and W. Febry and Sons, Ltd., and Wrings Transport, Ltd., that they wOuld not accept work from Fisons and the National Smelting Co. Mr. T. D. Corpe, for the applicants; said • that although the distanct from the docks to the new I.C.I. site was only five miles, the matter of transport was a difficult one because vehicles of. a special type were required. The " A" Licence vehicles operated by the applicants could not be used for the purpose. The special vehicles would cost a great deal of money and Messrs. Fish did not want to cornmit themselves until they had a licence.


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